It's a shame the creator didn't know the difference. If I had invested, thinking it would be a pack of "Professional Bicycle Playing Cards", I would have been quite disappointed.
I may be wrong here, but I think it was pretty obvious that this deck was appealing to a different kind of collector from the target audience of CARC, et al, or at least, a different part of the collector's brain. I wasn't looking at this and saying, "Hey! He's using casino stock!" I realize, your mileage may vary. But like you, I never assumed that this was actually the kind of deck he was going to produce. The maze was always the thing. I also think he stated somewhere in the description that this was going to be on bicycle stock.
(And I agree, the creator shouldn't have used CARC's photo as a starting point, but how many people look at a car ad and assume the girl in the bikini comes with the car?)